Harry Potter and the Hatred of Teachers

His political fantasy and ours

The release ofHarry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 will be the final installment in the most popular story cycle since Jesus and the Escape from the Enchanted Tomb. Seven books and eight movies have somehow not sated the hunger for the bespectacled boy from Little Whinging [NO. 1]. Meanwhile, the final spasm of Pottermania is coinciding with an assault on teachers' unions by Republican governors in New Jersey and Wisconsin, who are forcing decreases in the benefits and pay of teachers at the exact moment when the changing nature of the economy has rendered it nearly impossible for anyone without an education to enter the middle class [NO. 2]. The governors believe, and they may well be right, that beating up on teachers is a political winner. So the same people who will rush out to Deathly Hallows to watch the completion of a magical education will rush out in November to make sure education is cheaper. The fantasy of school life and its reality have never been further apart [NO. 3].

Teachers have become weird symbols in our public imagination, repositories of our most extreme hopes and fears. The magic in the Harry Potter books is mostly borrowed tinsel and a distraction from the main thrust of the plots — the dramatic and meaningful relationships with the instructors at the school. What J. K. Rowling figured out is that we all suspect that our teachers lead magnificent secret lives, whether for good or for evil. Teachers inhabit the space between childhood and adulthood, between family and the wider world, and as such seem impossibly grander and more dangerous than they really are. Therefore the professors at Hogwarts are werewolves, frauds, assassins, secret agents, and saviors of the world [NO. 4].

The childish view of teachers, the mingled adoration and loathing and imagining of secret lives, did not begin with Harry Potter, of course. The sixties produced Mary Poppins (teacher as magical mommy replacement) and To Sir, with Love (teacher as civil-rights hero) and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (teacher as liberated goddess). A few decades later, Stand and Deliver and Dead Poets Society taught us that teachers could terminate teenage angst and gangs and be Oscar bait. Meanwhile, Walter White on Breaking Bad is a dedicated chemistry teacher who's an even better meth cooker. But what began as farce fifty years ago has culminated as tragedy. The attack on teachers' unions is partly a panicky response to massive budget deficits, but it also derives from sheer exhaustion. America has been trying to fix its schools since Mary Poppins first danced on London rooftops. We've tried every flavor of politics as a solution — socialism, the free market, and everything in between. We can't blame the students. We won't blame ourselves. So who's left to blame?

For Republican governors, teachers are a perfect bogeyman, a combination of elitism, socialism, and bureaucracy — the hatred for teacherly authority has taken a new tack, but the content of the hatred, its emotional energy, the anarchic cry for freedom, has remained the same. The teenagers who grew up in rock 'n' roll rebellion have learned that the best way to lash out at teachers isn't by songs but by breaking their unions [NO. 5]. J. K. Rowling and the Republican governors share a fundamentally childish view of the teacher, although, to be fair, Rowling writes children's books and the Republican governors write policy. But why do we have to choose between our teachers being gods or monsters? Why can't they just be ordinary people tasked with an extraordinarily tough job?

By all lights, the fantasy and the reality of school life will continue diverging. Harry Potter is now entering the realm of the classics. Its powerful imagery about the role of teachers in our lives has already been established as the most formative educational fantasy for a generation. And the Republican governors, having found a political idea that is not demographic suicide, will in all likelihood extend their demonization of the teachers' unions on the national stage in 2012 [NO. 6]. The cost of producing Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is about $250 million, while schools in Florida — where the Harry Potter theme park resides — will suffer a $1 billion cut. We pay for the fantasy that we won't pay for in reality. We invest in fictional teachers rather than real ones.

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